A hundred days after the Strait of Hormuz closed, the guns have started to go quiet. On 14 June, Washington and Tehran announced a deal to lift the naval blockade and reopen the strait, with a formal signing set for later this week in Switzerland. The market’s first instinct was not to celebrate but to wait. Roughly 850 tankers are still idling in and around the Gulf, and the largest owners have said plainly that they need the fine print, and a clear sequence for safe transit, before they send tonnage back through.
That caution is the real story. A ceasefire on paper does not reopen a trade lane; confidence does, and confidence is being rebuilt one passage at a time. The clearest signal of the week came from a single ship: the Petronet-controlled carrier Disha sailed laden through Hormuz with its transponder switched on, an LNG cargo from Qatar bound for India in plain view. After months of going dark, one operator deciding to be seen again says more about where risk is heading than any communiqué.
What the hundred days revealed is that the supply shock was never as large as the headlines priced. Early in the war traders feared twelve to fifteen million barrels a day would vanish; the figure that actually went missing looks closer to five or six, and perhaps as little as two once China’s own pullback is netted out. The barrels did not stop, but rerouted.
Wet Bulk
The rerouting has hardened into something structural. The United States finished the period as the world’s largest exporter of crude and refined products, shipping around 10.5 million barrels a day in May, ahead of Russia and Saudi Arabia, helped along by steady output and a run of strategic-reserve releases. Saudi Arabia kept four to five million barrels a day moving out of Yanbu on the Red Sea, bypassing Hormuz entirely. Venezuela, its output recovering, is now sending some 625,000 barrels a day to US refiners who say they can take more. The pattern of who supplies whom has reshaped itself around the closure.
Demand told the quieter half of the story. China cut crude imports from 11.7 million barrels a day in February to under nine by late May, leaning on stockpiles to keep its refineries fed and, in the process, cushioning the oil price for everyone else. When Chinese buyers return to restock, they will do so into a market whose freight has not yet normalised.
For now the war premium is still sitting in the rates. The benchmark VLCC run from the Gulf to China is paying around $400,000 a day, roughly three times last year’s average and within sight of the March record. The reopening that owners are waiting for is the same event that could deflate the number they are earning: hundreds of idle supertankers released at once would meet returning cargoes somewhere in the middle, and the side that moves first sets the price. You can read the standoff in the waiting flotillas off the Gulf, where nobody wants to be the last to charter at the top.
Charterer Lens
- The reopening is a rate event. A confirmed transit likely unwinds the VLCC premium quickly as idle tonnage releases; weigh that mean-reversion before fixing long at today’s levels.
- Treat the rerouting as permanent. US Gulf, Yanbu and Venezuelan barrels have rewired tonne-mile demand around Hormuz, and those lanes will not simply switch back.
- Watch the first movers: One laden carrier transiting with AIS on tells you more about real risk appetite than the signing ceremony.
Dry Bulk
Dry bulk kept to its own cycle this period, and that cycle cooled. The Baltic Dry Index gave back 8.5 percent to close near 2,729, and the Capesize 5TC fell about 13 percent across the week to roughly $37,250 a day, with the Pacific basin doing most of the damage on thin enquiry. After a spring of firm Capesize earnings, the segment has come off the boil.
The cooling is in the spot market: Bauxite has quietly become the second-largest Capesize trade after iron ore, with Guinea exporting some 183 million tonnes last year and the commodity now accounting for around 8.5 percent of all dry-bulk tonne-miles. That long haul to China is the ballast under Cape demand even on a soft week, which is why a dip in rates is not the same as a dip in cargo.
Two operational variables are worth pricing in now. From early July the Panama Canal trimmed the maximum draft in its Neopanamax locks to 49.5 feet, a precaution after NOAA declared a fresh El Niño that threatens to drain Gatún Lake the way the 2023 drought once did. A Cape-laden Neopanamax now leaves cargo on the dock or routes the long way. In Western Australia, around 350 BHP rail workers in the Pilbara have voted for industrial action that could begin by the end of June, putting a home-grown question mark over iron-ore liftings that the seaborne market usually takes for granted.
Grain offered no drama and plenty of supply. June’s WASDE moved almost nothing, with US wheat stocks the only notable cut, while Brazil’s Conab lifted its soybean crop to a record 180.3 million tonnes with 116 million earmarked for export. The freight that carries it has touched multi-year highs this year, but most of that is bunker cost passed through rather than vessels in short supply.
Charterer Lens
- A soft Capesize tape on firm structural demand is a fixing window, not a warning. Bauxite and Brazilian beans underpin the floor; consider prompt cover before the next demand leg.
- Re-stow for Panama from early July. The half-foot draft cut means lighter Neopanamax intake or a longer routing, and El Niño raises the odds it tightens further.
- Read grain freight net of bunkers. The multi-year-high headline is largely fuel pass-through.
Macro and Regulatory
If the war premium is fading, a policy premium is taking its place. The peak container season arrived early on the US West Coast, with Long Beach posting its third-busiest May on record and imports up 40 percent as shippers front-loaded ahead of tariffs; trans-Pacific spot rates jumped more than half in a single week. Hanging over that rush is a US move to revive port fees on Chinese-built and Chinese-operated ships, charged by the net ton, which a coalition of nearly 280 trade groups warns would land hardest on American grain and soybean exporters.
Owners are answering the uncertainty with flexibility. New orders in the Aframax class are shifting decisively toward coated tonnage that can switch between crude and clean products, with coated newbuildings now equal to more than half the existing LR2 fleet while uncoated Aframax orders barely keep pace with scrapping.
Enforcement, meanwhile, has not gone quiet just because Hormuz has: Britain boarded its first Russian shadow-fleet tanker in the English Channel, and Brussels tabled a 21st sanctions package that, for the first time, targets the bunkering and support vessels that keep the dark fleet moving.
Charterer Lens
- Price policy as a cost line. Per-ton port fees, tariff front-loading and minerals nationalism are now recurring inputs to freight, not one-off shocks.
- Flexible tonnage is winning for a reason. Coated Aframax and LR2 capacity that arbitrages crude and product will hold value as trade lanes keep shifting.
- Diligence still pays a premium. With support vessels now in scope and seizures spreading to European waters, vet the counterparties and the bunker chain, not only the carrying ship.
The Premium Changes Hands
For a hundred days the market priced a single fear: that oil would not get out. It got out anyway, by longer routes and quieter means, and the lesson of the reopening is that the disruption premium was always larger than the disruption. As the strait reopens, that premium will not vanish so much as move. It is leaving the war and settling into policy, into the per-ton fee, the tariff deadline, the draft restriction and the sanctions list.
The discipline that pays does not change with the headline. Value still leaks where visibility is thin, where the route, the counterparty and the cost of delay go unpriced until the moment to act has passed. The barrels found the long way back. The desks that read the route came out ahead of the ones that traded the rumour.
Until next week,
The Voyager Portal Team